Photo Credit: blog.nz-online.de

Am I the only Canadian that wishes Barack Obama could be my leader? Politics aside, the man can speak. When he gives a speech, people listen. When Stephen Harper gives a speech, people fall asleep, or at least I do. From the moment Obama took office and said that he would “unclench his fist and extend an open hand,” I was hooked on the man and stopped really listening to whatever it is Stephen Harper says. I paid a hell of a lot more attention to Obama’s most recent State of the Union address than I did to Harpers speech at the World Economic Forum. As I said earlier, I fall asleep staring at his grey head of hair.
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Photo Credit: Blacknight Solutions

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…The famous opening phrase to Charles Dickens’ novel “A Tale Of Two Cities” was applied to the times in which Dickens lived, but it probably also applies to all periods in history, including our own. This past year represents both the best of times and the worst of times for us. What follows are a few random snapshots of the past year, representing both the good times and the bad.
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A walkout is a victory for the deniers

I interviewed Elizabeth May yesterday on my “Climate Change Reality Radio Show,” Breakin’ Ice, and she’s certainly a smart cookie. By far the most knowledgeable of the federal leaders on global warming, greening the economy, and so on, she’s also the only one who ‘gets’ the danger of climate change.


But there is one critical thing she doesn’t get, and neither do most well-meaning people: Those she is up against have a different morality. I have called it the Predator Morality, as it accurately describes the behaviour of the deniers and free market fundamentalists. Think about the Canadian Harper government; these are people who wrote a secret manual on subverting our democratic system. Do you really think they are going to negotiate in good faith or that their word can be trusted? These are people who put ideology before their own children. Calling them predators is not name-calling – it is an accurate description of their observed behaviour.
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Official portrait of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Port of Spain, Trinidad 2009

At the recently concluded Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper missed an opportunity to set a firm commitment for a reduction in North American greenhouse gas emissions which would have challenged his American counterpart to follow suit.

The Harper government has made no secret of its disdain for the existing Kyoto targets (which he once called ‘a Socialist scheme’), going so far as to announce what he felt were more ‘practical’ emissions reductions calling for a 20% reduction of 2006 levels by 2020. This has only raised the ire of environmental groups in Canada, who say that the government is in no position to promise alternative emissions reductions while opposing Kyoto and allowing the limits set by that protocol to balloon to levels 30% higher than the agreement called for.
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Fisting Syria

Israel is a vital country. I do not deny this. I am not among the fanatics who call for its abolishment, its destruction, nor do I approve any Islam-inspired pogrom against it. Last week I found myself pouring over the musings of Theodor Herzl. Mr. Herzl is oft misunderstood because, in light of the ethnocentric perspective that he had, that perspective was wholly justifiable in light of his particular slice of the European Zeitgeist. He had it right! Had there been no state of Israel created it was very likely that additional violence be visited upon European Jews after WWII. In fact, the creation of the modern State of Israel gave to Jews a sense of rooted nationhood; connection to land, and this was no small thing indeed.

Allow me to reveal my politics further; I for one am happy that the Jewish State exists in the demarcation set out by the American and British cartographers. I don’t think that the Uganda initiative sought by many, including Herzl, would have worked out – indeed the history of the Ismali (who in some extreme Islamist circles hated even more than Jews) and their flight from Uganda demonstrates clearly that political stability around and within a country is necessary for that nation’s long-term hope and happiness especially for immigrant populations.
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In response to North Korea’s recent rocket launch, Barack Obama spoke in Prague and gave those in attendance a dandy piece of fiction: a world without nuclear arms. Imagine that. I can’t conceive how the United States, the most powerful country with nuclear arms, even attempts to spearhead a project of this magnitude. I find it ironic that the most nuclear dependant country in the world is championing an anti-nuclear arms cause. This is full of contradictions. The Americans didn’t win the Cold War because they flipped better burgers.

Barack even conceded that a nuclear free world will probably not even occur in our life time. Why champion this cause? More brownie points I suppose. It’s what they want to hear, and not what we need to happen. There are more important problems to solve such as Iraq, the economy and even the Russian territorial claims. Our world is too dependant on nuclear arms as a deterrent than ever before. At least it was simple before. In the Cold War, it was us or them. Now, there is a baker’s dozen worth of nations competing for nuclear supremacy. North Korea has nuclear technologies! Doesn’t this frighten anyone? If this really worried anyone, they should have done something about it when they had the chance. If we want to decrease the amount of nuclear arms, why don’t we make an effort to stop these rogue nations?

Why hasn’t Barack Obama learned to love the bomb yet? We need it on our side. You’d think all those years of Cold War indoctrination would have gotten to him. Apparently not. Perhaps the American government has moved onto death-ray technologies? I hope so.

The most serious failures connected to the events of 9/11 are not those of US intelligence agencies, airport security services, NORAD and the like. Rather the deepest and darkest of the failures to protect us for those enemies that menace us most lie with journalists, mainstream media outlets, professors and the universities that employ us. It is we who have in the vast majority of cases chosen to abandon our skepticism and with it our professional ethics and responsibilities. By and large our professional class and caste continue to respond to the events of 9/11 in ways that are expedient rather than wise. As I see it, therefore, it is a mass treason of the intellectuals that constitutes the most significant underlying condition resulting in the continuing fraud known as the War on Terror. The War on Terror continues to be packaged, promoted and sold to the public in the most aggressive campaign of psychological warfare ever mounted. How many of us are complicit with our silence in this black psyop, the key enabling factor in the ongoing aggressive wars justified in the name of an unfounded and unproven official conspiracy theory of 9/11?………
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Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Jon, and I’ve lived in the heart of Canadian politics – Ottawa – for each of my 22 years. This is my first foray into the blogosphere, and I have been critical of it in the past. The main issue I had with bloggers is that many tend to hide behind the anonymity and security of their online personae. The distance created between the blogger and his/her audience by the internet allows the blogger to say things that she/he would not say if standing face-to-face with another person. So, I make a promise to you, my reader. Every word that you read in this, and any future postings I make, are words that I would be proud to speak, no matter the situation. And with the preamble now out of the way, let me tell you how Barack Obama will change the world.
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After 8 years of wondering how it’s possible that W got elected – twice! – I came to the unlikely realization that we owe the man a debt of gratitude. The obvious reason is that without an administration of such profound stupidity, Mr. Obama would have been unlikely to even make it onto the Democratic ticket, let alone get elected.

However, there is a less obvious side effect to the Bush years; he made us fall in love with our own country. For 8 years we thanked our lucky stars, patted ourselves on the back and basked in the warm glow of hearing liberal Americans, again and again, utter the statement “I’m moving to Canada”.
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